These days, it’s impossible to have a successful small business without having a website. And even if you don’t sell your products or services online, the benefits of a high-quality website can’t be ignored. A good website can get your business noticed on the world stage, and it will help you tap into your potential local customer base. If you own a small business and have a relatively ineffective website, then this article may have a few tips that could help you discover your business’s online potential.

Reconsider Your Website Design

First off, it’s important to make sure your website is well designed. There’s no point in having a great product/service and brand if your website is uninviting. Users have become much fussier about websites and are likely to leave a website quickly if they perceive it to be low quality. It doesn’t even matter if your product or service is very high quality if your website isn’t, as the potential customer will assume you’re only as good as your website and leave in search of one of your competitors.

View your website’s presentation as an extension of your company’s brand and a direct representation of your products or services. So, put a little time and budget into producing a great-looking website.

However, web design isn’t just about the colour scheme, typeface, and general appearance of your website, it also focuses on your website’s layout and the way a customer makes their way through your various pages. Consider your customers’ journey through your website and how easily they can find what they’re looking for. Ask yourself if they could find what they’re looking for more easily if your store was split into clearer categories or if you added a filter that allowed them to view your products according to their colour, price, size, etc. All of these features help customers find what they want and they reassure customers that your business is of the highest possible quality.

Shop Around for Web Developers

Once you work out which website changes you want to make, you have to figure out how to do them. You will almost certainly require the help of a web developer. However, not all web developers are created equal, so it’s definitely worth shopping around before you settle on a particular web developer, so don’t be afraid to phone them up and ask how they’d approach your website. Make notes of the different developers’ methods (and the price they quote) and then compare them to each other.

Look out for web developers who try to bamboozle you with technical jargon as they may be using this language to impress you and disguise their inexperience. The best, most competent developers will be able to explain their process without confusing you. It’s also a good idea to take a look over each web developers’ client testimonials. If you have the time, call up the companies and ask them about their experience with their web developer.

There is such a huge difference in the costs (and hidden costs) of different web developers, as the best ones are fully transparent and the worst ones can charge unreasonable fees for small alterations and refuse to let them out of their contract. One tactic the better web developers may suggest is for you to change web platforms…

Consider Changing Web Platforms

You may have to change web platforms to achieve the results you want. A web platform is a program/application that runs your website on the internet completely independent of your computer’s operating system. Not all web platforms were created equal, and specific platforms are suited to specific functions. Good web developers will advise you on the best web platform for your requirements and can ensure that your move is as quick and easy as possible.

The two biggest contenders are WordPress and Magento. Specialist web developers like Peacock Carter have people who specialise in either WordPress or Magento, so you get the best person for the job, whichever platform you choose. Choosing can be difficult, however, as both platforms offer such a wide range of functions.

The main reason to choose WordPress is because it has such a huge range of extensions and add-ons that allow you to customise your website however you see fit. WordPress also arguably offers the easiest content management system (CMS), allowing you to write new pages, blogs, articles, etc, and upload them to your site. Because of WordPress’s intuitive CMS, it is ideal for businesses who don’t sell products or services online but instead use their website as a way to generate interest in their store and encourage people to visit them. That said, you can also add an ecommerce extension to your WordPress site and it will function well as an online store. WordPress’s flexibility is what makes it stand out from its competitors.

Magento, on the other hand, is a purpose-built ecommerce platform with a range of functions and options that make it ideal for small businesses looking to increase the size and efficacy of their online store. As Magento was designed to function primarily as an ecommerce platform, it has superior built-in ecommerce functions, such as multicurrency, multilingual, and multisite capabilities. You can also add additional products to a Magento site without having to pay an additional fee as with some other ecommerce platforms. This allows your business to grow as fast as it can without making you pay for the privilege.

Focus on Search Engine Optimisation

Marketing should be a priority for any business and search engine optimisation (SEO) is the most important part of any digital marketing strategy. Most people use search engines to find what they’re looking for online. And since Google has over 77% of the search engine global market share, it’s best to focus on making sure your website is as visible to Google as possible. There are some really clear and easy ways to ensure Google can find your website and rank it highly for terms specific to your products or services. One way is to ensure that each page has a clear subject and that the content reflects this. If you’d like to learn more about content optimisation, then check out Moz Academy’s Page Optimization section. The principle is relatively simple, however: write well-informed, useful content and be clear on your title tag, H1 and in your content body about what your page is about. If you do this for each of your category pages, then they are much more likely to be ranked highly by Google.

Another aspect of SEO is link building. If you already have a website, you have probably been contacted by people asking for a link back to their website. There is a much more legitimate way to do this, however, and it involves finding similar or relevant websites who aren’t competitors and writing content for them that is relevant to their audience. If you do this well enough, you’ll be able to credit yourself and link back to your website without doing anything untoward.

SEO is really about making sure your website is clear, fast, and easy to navigate. Google wants to point users to the best websites and it has a range of sophisticated algorithms that help it do this. One great way to consistently improve your website’s authority on Google is put time and expertise into a company blog…

Make a Company Blog

Writing a company blog helps improve the SEO of your website by giving Google more high-quality original content to cache and rank. Google wants to reward websites with greater amounts of high-quality original content, so a company blog is the ideal platform in order to produce regular industry-specific blog posts, interesting articles, news stories, FAQs, and helpful guides. If you ensure your website contains a range of different relevant articles then Google will reward you by raising you in its rankings.

You can also make your content production even more focused by finding out exactly what your customers are Googling about your industry and writing content that meets their needs. For example, if you have a sunglasses business and there is a large volume of users Googling ‘What sunglasses suit my face shape?’ you can write a sunglasses face shape guide that answers this question and others like it. This way, when people search for this in the future, it’s much more likely that Google will point them to your website. If you want to find out what questions people are Googling about your industry, then Answer the Public is the right online tool for you.

There is so much you can do to ensure your website is benefiting your small business, but I hope this article has given you enough ideas to get started.